ASCIIMath creating images

Tuesday, April 24, 2018

The DEMAND ("Diverse Environments Multichannel Acoustic Noise Database") Corpus is one of my most successful creations - at the time I'm writing this post, Google Scholar claims there are 43 citations of the main article describing it. (And I blogged about it here, here, here and here) So it was a bit of a nasty surprise when Professor Chan (of Queens University in Kingston, Ontario; a good friend of my Ph.D. supervisor) dropped me a note telling me the database had disappeared off the internet.

To my dismay, I did not have a copy of the data on my own harddrives either, except for the files sampled at 16 kHz; luckily after some frantic emailing, I was told by my former colleagues Remy and Nancy that INRIA still has backups of the original files and Emmanuel has a backup of the website along with the HTML and descriptive PDF. Note to self: KEEP WELL ORGANIZED BACKUPS!

There was still the problem of finding a new home to host the data, and Emmanuel suggested Zenodo, a platform funded by CERN and the EU for open-access data: DEMAND fits the bill pretty well. As a bonus, the dataset now has a "proper" DOI: .

I hope the new home of DEMAND is more permanent than the old one; ot certainly looks good. I'll be putting my HRTF database (blog post, brief preliminary conference paper) on there too once the main journal article describing it is vetted - actually the data is already there, it just needs to be released.

Enjoy the data! (And let's hope the new location will pop up at the top of Google when using the search terms "DEMAND noise", as the old one did!)